Lenin: A Biography

by Robert John Service

Zamyatin had put his finger on the harmful dottiness of much governmental activity and language. But such satirical exposures became increasingly rare as the Bolsheviks closed down the critical political press. Lenin was not personally offended; he simply wanted to put a stop to criticism of all types outside the Bolshevik party. He was a cheerful repressor and his regime grew much more severe than Zamyatin could have imagined it would.

  Even so, Lenin was already showing signs of physical and mental strain. The workload in Sovnarkom and the Bolshevik Central Committee was enormous and evidently was unlikely to diminish in the foreseeable future. After all, a government had seized power which was committed to comprehensive penetration of every aspect of political, social and cultural life. Nadezhda Konstantinovna could see the effects and on his health and, whereas in earlier years they would have chatted about politics on their walks, now she sought to enable him to get relief from the tensions of the Smolny Institute. If they spoke about politics, it would usually be in connection with her work in the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment – and even then it would be at Lenin’s instigation rather than hers. Their marriage had become a coupling of comfort, and the comfort was unidirectional: Krupskaya supported her husband and coped with her own difficulties without telling him.9 Her role was of considerable importance to him because his sisters Anna and Maria paid only fleeting visits to the flat; and Krupskaya, like every Bolshevik, sensed that the party and its leader were lighting up a dawn in the history of humanity.

  Gradually their routines at home and at work became more settled. Lenin took on Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich and Nikolai Gorbunov as his personal assistants. He also acquired a personal chauffeur, Stepan Gil, who drove him around the city in a limousine. He had Margarita Fofanova and other young Bolshevik women as secretaries. He and Krupskaya had their own maid, paid for by the state, and Lenin began to eat much better than in Finland when he had cooked on a little kerosene stove.

  It was their physical security that drew Lenin and Krupskaya to live in the Smolny Institute. They genuinely wanted to stay there because the Institute was the heart of the great Revolution and they had no plan to return to a flat in the city’s tenements. Apart from their occasional strolls near the Institute they spent little time in the city. Naturally Lenin gave speeches to large meetings at the Putilov Works and other principal locations of the Bolshevik party’s activity, but he did not venture out very often. Politics had always dominated his social life; even when he took summer holidays, he talked, read and wrote about party affairs – and Krupskaya suggested that he dreamed about them when asleep. And so it was a true delight for him, at least in the first weeks after the October Revolution, to live, work and rest in the Institute. Here Lenin met visitors from ‘the localities’, which meant anyone who was not living in Petrograd. One of the defining moments in his career had occurred in 1905 when he and Father Gapon had closeted themselves together day after day. Now Lenin could see and chat with any worker, soldier or peasant in the capital. And all the great revolutionary institutions were based within its walls. Here was the Bolshevik Central Committee, the Military-Revolutionary Committee, Sovnarkom, the Petrograd Soviet and the Central Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets.

  On each of these institutions he had a direct, steady influence. It was a welcome change after those months in hiding in Razliv and Helsinki, when he was dependent upon others to carry his written messages to fellow party leaders. And what a relief after the émigré years of faulty postal links, factional strife and police infiltration!

  High politics were concentrated in a single building and never more than a short stroll away from Lenin. He felt that he had been made for this moment, for this Revolution, for this beginning of an epoch in the world history. He communicated his contentment to his comrades in the Institute. When events turned out not quite as predicted by him, he would dredge one of his learned proverbs from memory. Quoting Goethe, he said: ‘Theory is grey but life is green.’ For a man who had chronically divided his party on questions of Marxist dogma this was not a little paradoxical. But Lenin had never been a one-dimensional politician; intuition and improvisation had always been his characteristics. He put this, in his portentous fashion, at the Central Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets: ‘Socialism is not brought into existence by commands from above. State-bureaucratism is alien to it; socialism that is living and creative is the creation of the popular masses themselves.’10 But he was not going to leave everything to those ‘popular masses’. Moving from room to room in the Smolny Institute, he ensured that the central state and party institutions imposed whatever degree of authority they could in the turbulent conditions of revolutionary Russia.

  As he quickly discovered, this required that a degree of authority should be imposed on the institutions. He had plenty to do. The Bolshevik Central Committee was fairly orderly, but its members had only the task of setting down general guidelines and were anyway subject to party discipline. The new state institutions were a different matter. The Central Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets held noisy meetings that sprawled over days and was rarely able to get on rapidly with its legislative work. Although a Presidium was formed under the chairmanship of Sverdlov, the chaotic conditions were not eliminated. Sovnarkom was little better. Long, self-indulgent speeches and endless discussion of trivial practical matters were the norm.

  Lenin introduced a set of formal procedures. In particular, he gave People’s Commissars a maximum of ten minutes to present their reports.11 He interrupted them whenever a report looked likely to be extended into a doctrinal exposition: he wanted practical policy, not oratory. He reprimanded and even fined those of them who were late for meetings; he simply could not stand it if they chatted during the proceedings. He himself stuck to the rules and expected others to do the same. A problem for him was that People’s Commissars were often so laden by duties that they had to send one of their deputies to put the Commissariat’s case for them. Sovnarkom was becoming a social entertainment for many participants. Several of them were not even Bolsheviks but Left Socialist-Revolutionaries or their various sympathisers. And yet Sovnarkom had to take decisions swiftly and imposingly, and few but Lenin had an appropriate sense of responsibility to deal with the situation. Even if he had not seen colleagues for months, he refrained from holding up proceedings but instead would pass them a written note of greeting. Always he was trying to hurry things up. And to delineate policy and check that it was being carried out.

  Among the regular troublemakers was Cheka Chairman Felix Dzierżyński. Although Dzierżyński was an enforcer of discipline throughout the revolutionary regime, he defied the ban on smoking at Sovnarkom meetings. Most of the People’s Commissars smoked and found it difficult to get through a meeting without a puff or two. Dzierżyński made up any number of excuses to wander away from the long green-baize table and when he thought he was out of Lenin’s sight he lit up a cigarette next to the chimney-breast.

  It was in this disorderly environment that Lenin was trying to sort out his thoughts. As a communist he wanted a transformation of state and society throughout the world, but increasingly he concluded that some of the party’s policies were hindering the advance towards communism. Everything on his short, peripatetic outings near the Smolny Institute suggested to him that changes needed to be made. In 1918 he reversed many policies. The transformation was so rapid and so drastic that there was talk at the time and subsequently that everything Lenin did was the result of a long-laid plan to deceive his way to power by disguising his true intentions. This would mean that the maker of the October Revolution was a world-historical cynic. According to such an interpretation, Lenin had always intended much harsher measures in government than he had espoused in opposition. Some of his critics attributed this to his megalomania. Others traced it to the secret subsidy forwarded to the Bolshevik Central Committee by the German Imperial government; their contention was that it was the Germans who dictated the party’s foreign policy, i
n particular after the October seizure of power.

  And yet, while Lenin was cunning and untrustworthy, he was also dedicated to the ultimate goal of communism. He enjoyed power; he lusted after it. He yearned to keep his party in power. But he wanted power for a purpose. He was determined that the Bolsheviks should initiate the achievement of a world without exploitation and oppression. In 1917, while his party received money from Berlin, he did not regard himself as a German agent any more than the German authorities felt that they had bought him on a permanent basis. Each side was confident that it had tricked the other.

  Lenin was ready to contemplate a lengthy period for the consolidation of the European socialist Revolution. There might be civil war – in fact there almost certainly would be such wars. There might be wars between socialist and capitalist states. Indeed there might even be a Second World War if the European socialist Revolution did not occur and inter-imperial capitalist rivalries persisted. Lenin could not stand it when his fellow Bolsheviks failed to understand that such setbacks were only to be expected. Unlike him, they could not grasp that politics was always messier than the prescriptions of doctrine. The few who had this understanding had caused him problems in the recent past. Kamenev and Zinoviev had warned that the October seizure of power would be followed by political catastrophe, and several of the People’s Commissars who resigned their posts were of similar mind. Stalin, despite sticking by Lenin throughout the crisis, had never believed that the European socialist Revolution was imminent. It was crucial for Lenin to bring these figures back to his side and let bygones be bygones. He needed their help to face down the other party leaders – by far the largest number – who resented his proposed reversals in Bolshevik policy; they had agreed to the April Theses because they had accepted Lenin’s argument that Revolution would be easy in Russia and easier still in Germany.

  One proposal by Lenin, however, had become uncontroversial among Bolsheviks. Since the first day of the October Revolution he had urged them in vain to postpone the Constituent Assembly elections for fear that the party would not win them. His prediction was fulfilled in November, when the Bolsheviks achieved only a quarter of the votes. Opinion started to turn in favour of ignoring the result of the elections. Even Bolsheviks who had wanted an all-socialist governmental coalition agreed on this. The same was true of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries. Thus Lenin secured Sovnarkom’s agreement to breaking up the Constituent Assembly after it met in Petrograd in January 1918.

  Bolsheviks and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries would not let the revolutionary transformation in Russia and Europe be jeopardised by a Constituent Assembly election. Neither the Bolsheviks nor the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries had a basic commitment to electoral procedures, and, having seized power, they did not intend to relinquish it. They were revolutionaries first and democrats only insofar as democracy strengthened the revolutionary cause. The also argued that the arrangements for the Constituent Assembly elections, inherited from the Provisional Government, put them at an unfair disadvantage. The list of the Party of Left Socialist Revolutionaries had been drawn up before the split with the Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries in November. The result was that the peasants who supported the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries’ approval of Lenin’s Decree on Land could not vote specifically for the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries. Equally irksome was the fact that the elections took place in mid-November, long before most people in the country had had time to become acquainted with Lenin’s innovations in policy. The Sovnarkom coalition thought that it could have pulled off a victory in the Constituent Assembly elections if only the arrangement had been delayed a few months.

  Lenin made this point while plotting the destruction of the Constituent Assembly. His plan was insidiously clever. The Assembly’s elected members would be allowed to meet at the Tauride Palace, where Sovnarkom’s representatives would demand that the Assembly’s main party – the Socialist-Revolutionaries – accede to the basic policies decreed by Sovnarkom and to the form of government provided by the soviets. If the Constituent Assembly refused, its members should be locked out of the building next day. The beauty of the plan would be that it would involve little bloodshed.

  The other great change of policy contemplated by Lenin was a lot more contentious within the Sovnarkom coalition. This was his suggestion that a separate peace should be signed with the Central Powers. The Bolsheviks had always argued that the Great War was imperialist in motivation and that there was only one way to end it: socialist revolutions across Europe. They thought that propaganda and fraternisation among soldiers would do the trick. If such an outcome did not occur, the Bolsheviks expected to instigate a ‘revolutionary war’ to carry socialism into Europe on the points of their bayonets. But they were optimists and assumed that ‘revolutionary war’ would not be necessary. The notion of a separate peace on the eastern front was inconceivable to them, as indeed it was to every other Russian political party. It was against this logic, which he himself had helped to establish, that Lenin began to make a stand. Signs appeared on 17 December, when he ordered the issuing of a questionnaire on Russian military preparedness. His questions were brutally searching. Was it really possible for a German attack to be repelled? Was it wise to continue to put the case for ‘revolutionary war’? Would soldiers in fact prefer the signature of a separate peace? The replies confirmed whatever worries he already possessed: the Russian armed forces barely existed in strength on the eastern front and such soldiers who remained were largely in favour of peace at almost any price.12

  There has always been speculation that Lenin’s questionnaire was a feint to disguise the fact that he was complying with the instructions of his paymasters in Berlin. Those who believe ‘German gold’ paid for the October Revolution contend that the separate peace on the eastern front was the price exacted in exchange.13 This is pretty implausible stuff. Whatever promises or intimations Lenin gave to German diplomats, he was not a man to stick to his word, a word given to a rapacious, imperialist government. Indeed perhaps the greatest work he did for the German military cause had already been accomplished on 26 October when he published his Decree on Land and his Decree on Peace. He would have introduced these measure regardless of his financial relationship with Berlin. Their result, anyway, was the degradation of the ability of the Russian forces to wage war because the soldiers on the eastern front flooded back to their villages in order to get their share of the land that was being redistributed. But the Central Powers wanted more: they demanded that Sovnarkom should formally disclaim any sovereignty over Poland, Latvia and Belorussia. They demanded the signature of a treaty. Lenin’s willingness to come to terms was dictated not by financial indebtedness but by the fear that, if Sovnarkom did not give way, the demands of the Central Powers might become still more grievous – as in fact happened in January 1918.

  As his worries about the eastern front became acute, Lenin was also troubled by the gamut of Soviet economic and social policies. The easy Revolution predicted by him for Russia had not been realised, and he had to reformulate strategy in order to maintain the regime’s impetus. But for this he also needed a break from the daily routine of Sovnarkom and the Bolshevik Central Committee. Ill health and overwork were dragging him down. Apart from his brief walks around the Smolny Institute, he had no chance to relax. Just two months after re-entering the public gaze at the Second Congress of Soviets, he decided to slip away from the Smolny Institute for a brief holiday.

  On 24 December he set off with his wife Nadya and his sister Maria for the Finland Station to meet Eino Rahja, whose train would take them along the familiar track to the north. Their destination was the tuberculosis sanatorium at Halila near the Finnish village of Uusikirkko, forty-five miles north of the Russian capital. Lenin badly needed to restore himself. Central Committee member Jan Berzins and his family were already convalescing there. The snow was crisp and deep, the air was fresh and Lenin was able to go out for walks in the countryside. It was one of those odd moments in h
is life. Lenin was the premier of the Russian state and had recently granted independence to Finland. By going to Uusikirkko, he was from a legal standpoint crossing a state border without permission. But he thought less about the implications of his own legislation than about his earlier experiences as a fugitive in the Finnish countryside in 1907 and 1917. Unconsciously he started to talk in a low voice so as not to be overheard by potential agents of the Ministry of the Interior! He forgot that it was now he who controlled the secret police. Another problem was that the daylight hours were even shorter, that far north, than in Petrograd. He spent most of his time stuck indoors writing – writing and fretting.

  Even in Halila he had no peace from his colleagues in Sovnarkom. Hardly had he got there than Stalin wrote asking him to return to the Smolny Institute by midday on 28 December. Stalin needed his advice on relations with Ukraine.14 Lenin held on until 29 December, but not surprisingly he hardly felt he had had a proper holiday. He brought back several draft articles with him, but their contents were so pessimistic that he did not hand them to Pravda. The reason for this was not the dark midwinter in Uusikirkko but his own presentiment that, unless Sovnarkom became firmer in its imposition of order in Russia, the days of the October Revolution were numbered.

  In those drafts, preserved in Lenin’s archive, he called for soviets and other popular organisations to hold fewer open meetings. Too much time was being wasted. According to Lenin, moreover, workers had become excessively self-indulgent. The striking printworkers should be treated as hooligans and, if their withdrawal of labour continued, put under arrest. The Soviet regime had been altogether too soft. Lenin expostulated that comprehensive ‘registration and supervision’ were urgently overdue, explaining:

  The objective of this registration and supervision is clear and universally understandable: that everyone should have bread, go about in sturdy footwear and decent clothing, should have a warm dwelling and should work conscientiously; that no scoundrel (including anyone who shirks doing any work) should be free to roam about but should be held in prison or should work off his sentence in forced labour of the heaviest kind; and that none of the wealthy, evading the rules and laws of socialism, should be able to evade the same fate as the scoundrel – the fate that in justice ought to become the fate of wealthy people.